Out of the Cocoon

by William Leisner

  “Well, because the Mariposans needed the Bringloidi…for…they weren’t able…” Gomez paused. She hadn’t really wanted to sidetrack the briefing with the big contentious issue, but…“The population of Mariposa was made up entirely of clones.”

  Eight sets of eyes locked on Gomez for a silent moment. Then Stevens shook his head and said, “See, it’s these juicy parts that get lost when you make a long story short.”

  “Clones?” Lense asked, suddenly fully engaged in the conversation. “An entire colony?” Gomez could see her thoughts jump to warp behind her eyes. “Huh…”

  “What does that have to do with the Bringloidi?” Tev asked. “And why would it have bearing on the request to remove all their technology?” He seemed annoyed that Lense understood something he didn’t.

  Lense looked back at Tev. “If they’ve been cloning themselves for all these years, and then cloning from clones of clones, the point will come where the replicative fading of their DNA is going to make any further cloning impossible. Their race would die out.”

  “And so they were hoping the Bringloidi would help them carry on their culture,” Abramowitz said, frowning thoughtfully. “I suppose there’s a certain amount of sense in that.”

  “Oh, yes,” Tev grumbled, “it makes perfect sense…if Picard’s primary goal was to rid himself of these refugees as quickly as possible.”

  Captain Gold raised a bushy eyebrow at Tev, but didn’t say anything. Tev had been off ship the last time the Enterprise rendezvoused with the da Vinci, during their business with Rod Portlyn. It was possible that he was unaware that Gold and Picard had been friends since their Starfleet Academy days. Though, it was just as possible that, to his mind, it made no difference.

  “And now,” Tev continued, “it would seem the clash between the two cultures has effected some major, possibly deadly, crisis.”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Gold said. “We have a few facts and a lot of speculation only.” He paused then to tap at his combadge. “Gold to bridge. Any luck getting a response to our hails from Mariposa, Haznedl?”

  “Negative, sir,” responded the operations officer.

  Gold sighed. “Keep trying. Constant hails, all frequencies.”

  “All right,” Gomez said. “Pattie, Carol, Domenica: I’ll give you what we have on the Mariposans and Bringloidi. Let’s get a picture of where these people stand in terms of their technological infrastructure, what sort of society is likely to have developed since their joining, and how we’re going to deal with that society if it is, in fact, on the verge of falling apart.”

  With that, the briefing was adjourned. As everyone stood to leave, Gomez moved around the table to intercept Faulwell. “Bart, I’m sorry, you probably are going to be a little bored during this assignment.”

  He shrugged. “That’s how it goes. I suppose you already know mariposa is the Spanish word for butterfly?”

  “Yeah.” Gomez smirked. “But actually, there is something you can do. Something that could mean the difference between success or failure this mission.”

  Faulwell gave her a slow, knowing nod. “I knew you were never going to remember that song lyric.”

  “Oh, shut up…”

  Chapter

  2

  Gold tapped the disconnect tab on his desktop monitor, and Jean-Luc Picard’s face disappeared, replaced by the Federation seal. He tapped his fingers on the desktop some more, staring blankly and thinking about the information his old friend had given him.

  He had no idea how long he sat like that, or what had sparked in his brain that brought him back to the present and refocused his stare. He’d apparently, for however long, been watching his left hand, his fingers still beating a rhythmless beat on the desktop.

  His hand. His fingers. He tended, whenever he thought about the biosynthetic replacement (which, many months since losing the original at Galvan VI, was less and less often, he was proud to say), to focus on the “synthetic” aspect. But it had been synthesized from biological elements—specifically, his own skin, bone, muscle, and nerve cells.

  His cloned cells.

  In some respect, that made him think of this appendage as being more freakish than had it been made of plastic and metal. And that was an attitude he had to put behind him before he had to deal with the Mariposans.

  After Gold had asked Picard a few questions about the Enterprise-D’s visit to the Ficus Sector over a decade ago, their conversation drifted to the topic of cloning in general. While the long war against the cloned warriors of the Dominion certainly colored their attitudes, the fact was that humanity had long been wary of the concept. Even before the discovery of DNA and genetic science, there were cautionary tales of evil twins, doppelgängers, automatons, and other soulless monsters created by those who dared to play God. Even with all the advances in human knowledge over the millennia, all the superstitious taboos shattered by science, there was still, for whatever reason, this almost instinctive aversion to this particular type of manipulation of nature.

  The chime of his ready room door snapped Gold out of his musings. He sighed, dropped his hand in his lap, and called, “Come.”

  “Pardon me, Captain,” Abramowitz said as she entered. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  Gold shook his head and gestured to one of his guest chairs (with his right hand, hiding the left; put it out of your mind, David). “Not at all. Any luck in your research?”

  The dark-haired woman gave a slight shrug of her shoulders. “I’ve been reviewing the reports from the Tubman, what little there is.”

  Gold nodded. About a year after the Enterprise’s departure, Starfleet had sent a second ship to do a sociological follow-up. The citizens of Mariposa, having previously gone over two hundred years without outside contact, were less receptive to the visitors than they had been when they were facing extinction. The Tubman cut their mission to Mariposa short, and three weeks later, after the Borg massacre at Wolf 359, the isolationist world had fallen to the bottom of Starfleet’s list of priorities.

  Abramowitz continued, asking, “Have you spoken yet with Captain Picard?”

  Of course that’s what she was going to ask. “Yes, I have.”

  Abramowitz nodded, expecting him to expand on his answer. After several quiet seconds, she added, “I was hoping he would have offered some insight as to his decision-making process at the time.”

  “All the pertinent information was included in his logs and reports, as the regulations require.”

  The cultural specialist looked far from assured. “With all respect, sir,” she said, speaking with deliberate care, “as I read those reports, I see Captain Picard making decisions based in large part on what was most convenient for him and his crew. The tone of his recordings suggest he had little tolerance for the refugees disrupting his ship, and he resettled them on the next M-class planet they found, citing ‘poetic justice’ as a factor.”

  “That is a gross simplification of the record,” Gold replied, although he had to admit it was not an unreasonable interpretation. Picard’s discomfort with the Bringloidi came through clearly in his reports, while the details of their interactions with the Mariposans were couched in more careful language.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but…Picard’s decision makes little sense to me. I need to have a better understanding of why this hybrid culture was created in the first place in order to formulate my own recommendations for this mission.”

  “I’ve always been most impressed by your ability to give sound advice in those cases where we know almost nothing about the cultures in question,” said Gold.

  The attempt at flattery did nothing to lighten the woman’s countenance. “Captain, I know you and Picard are old friends, but—”

  “All right, stop right there,” Gold snapped, and instantly regretted the sharpness of his tone. He paused to gather himself before continuing, “Yes, Picard is a longtime friend. And as a fellow captain, who knows what it’s like to sit in the center chair
and make quick decisions that are guaranteed to be examined in minute detail by people who weren’t there through the lens of twenty-twenty hindsight, I do hesitate to voice any criticisms I may have of his actions. That said, I strongly resent the implication that I would put my personal relationships above my responsibilities to this ship, this crew, and its mission.”

  “I apologize for offending—”

  Gold waved her off. “The fact is, sometimes starship captains do things they don’t think all the way through. They make contact with pre-warp civilizations or leave history books behind on away-team missions. Even I’ve made some stupid mistakes in my career,” Gold added, forcing a grin. “Captain Picard recognizes that the episode with the Bringloidi was not the most admirable in his career. He could have looked for other options for dealing with the Bringloidi, and then still more options for dealing with the Mariposans. He chose the option that looked most able to help both at the same time. It could have been a mistake in judgment, sure. But making those judgment calls is what captains are expected to do. There is no more explanation than that.”

  “Yes, sir.” Abramowitz nodded. She clearly wasn’t completely appeased, but she was satisfied that there were no secrets being withheld from her. “I’ll dig a little harder, and try to have some recommendations before we reach the planet.”

  “Thank you,” Gold nodded.

  Abramowitz stood and headed for the ready room door, then stopped and turned back to the captain. “You’ve made mistakes, sir?” she asked, flashing a tiny grin.

  Gold cocked an eyebrow at her. “Let’s let that be our little secret, Abramowitz.”

  “Ensign Gomez.”

  Sonya jumped like a cat, and spun around to face the superior officer who had moved up unnoticed behind her. “Commander Riker, sir.”

  A sliver of a smile showed through the XO’s beard. He was obviously amused by her nervous reaction…and probably grateful she didn’t have any sort of beverage in her hand at the moment. The smile didn’t last long, though. “Ensign, I need to discuss something with you. We can talk in Lieutenant La Forge’s office.”

  Sonya nodded, though the commander hadn’t waited for an answer before turning and heading for the chief engineer’s office. She turned back to where her current work partner still stood, gathering up her tool kit.

  “Ooohhh, you’re in trouuuble,” Lieutenant Kieran Duffy teased, looking and sounding like a demented five-year-old.

  Sonya gave him a mortified look. She woke up every morning worrying that someone would realize that they had erred, assigning her to the Federation flagship, when she didn’t reach the standards required for such an honor. And here was Duffy, not only showing zero concern that they’d been caught flirting with each other while on duty (and they were clearly flirting; people didn’t smile the way they were at each other while discussing datastream compression rates), but cracking jokes about it. Sonya wished she could decide whether she was shocked by Duffy’s carefree demeanor, or envious of it.

  She trotted around the warp core and turned the corner into La Forge’s office. Riker was leaning on a corner of the desk waiting and, to Sonya’s surprise, so was Dr. Pulaski, wearing a look of deep consternation. “Ensign Gomez,” the doctor said. “Please, have a seat.”

  Sonya looked from one senior officer to the other, at a complete loss to understand why Pulaski would be down in the engineering section to talk with her. “Is something wrong?”

  Neither answered immediately, hesitating for some reason. “Doctor…?” she prompted, her stomach starting to flutter. “Commander…?”

  “Commander?”

  Gomez’s head jerked up, and she saw Stevens standing on the opposite side of the mess hall table where she was seated. “Sorry, Fabe,” she apologized. “I was somewhere else.”

  Stevens nodded, indicating the padd she held in front of her. “Old Enterprise logs?”

  “Yep.” Bart had gotten her back into her personal logs in no time at all. She almost wished he hadn’t. “A real trip down memory lane.”

  Stevens took a seat across from her, studying her for a moment. “You okay?”

  Gomez sighed. It occurred to her that forgetting her password could have been her subconscious’s way to spare her both from reliving these old memories, and from having to deal with all her friends asking “are you okay?” “I’m fine,” she said. And it was true; not long ago, during the Dancing Star recovery, she also had to review logs of a previous encounter where Kieran had been involved. At that time, she had been reduced to tears. Now…“I feel fine,” she repeated. “Though, I’m not sure how I feel about feeling fine.” Stevens gave her a sympathetic smile, and reached across the table to give her forearm a gentle squeeze.

  They sat quietly like that for a moment longer before Gomez blurted, “They tried to clone us.”

  Stevens’s eyes looked as if they might drop out of his head. “What?”

  “Kieran and I were on the repair crew the Mariposans asked for when we first got there. It was one of the first times we were assigned to work together.” She paused briefly at that memory, smiling in spite of herself. “I was an ensign, he was a j.g. The two of us were paired off, and we did some work on their main biosynthesizing systems. Nothing seemed suspicious; we had no idea that they had done anything at all to us. But later, after the captain had the Mariposans’ cloning equipment confiscated and inspected, they found that they had stolen tissue samples from us, and almost all the human crew members who’d been down on the planet.”

  “My God,” Stevens whispered. Then he asked, “And the stolen samples?”

  “All destroyed as soon as they were identified.”

  Stevens pondered that silently for a second too long. Sonya could tell that he was wondering what if that hadn’t been the case, and that his friend might, in some way, have been preserved.

  “Good,” Stevens finally said. “Destroyed. That’s good.”

  Gomez made herself nod in concurrence.

  “Now entering the Mariposa system, Captain.”

  “Bring us into standard orbit, Wong,” Captain Gold ordered, then tapped his combadge. “Gomez and Tev, report to the bridge.” He leaned forward in his seat, watching the salmon-colored world surrounded by a system of gossamer rings grow larger and larger on the forward viewscreen. “Any response to hails yet?”

  “Negative, sir,” said Haznedl.

  “Switch from subspace to RF,” Gold said, “and be sure they know we’re now in orbit.” From what he’d gathered about the inhabitants of this world, Gold suspected that once they knew the Federation was now on their home turf, whatever communications failures that had plagued them up until now would be magically resolved.

  After a few more moments without a response, during which the engineers arrived on the bridge, Anthony Shabalala reported from tactical, “Sir, I’m detecting a dampening field of some sort being generated on the planet. It’s blocking our hails and all active scans.”

  Or not, Gold thought.

  “Why would these people so urgently call for our assistance,” Tev wondered aloud as he stepped across the bridge, “only to turn a deaf ear when we arrive?”

  “This is a very good question,” Gold said. “Can we punch a signal through, Shabalala?”

  The tactical officer frowned at his console readouts. “Sir, it’s a modulated tetryon field.”

  “A tetryon field? To block communications?” Tev shook his head. “That’s absurd! That would be akin to hunting the proverbial insect with a phaser rifle.”

  Gold nodded. Naturally occurring tetryon particle fields had the capability not only to disrupt a starship’s warp field, but also to rend gaps in the very fabric of space. “You’re right, Tev. This is for more than just blocking us.”

  “They’re using it to disrupt their power distribution system,” Gomez said. “The Klingons did this a lot during the war: they’d use their ships’ deflectors to flood a planet’s surface with tetryon radiation, to neutralize all directed
energy weapons and force the Jem’Hadar to face them in hand-to-hand combat. This field would render any kind of energy-dependent technologies useless.”

  Tev grunted softly. “It seems they’ve found the answer to whatever problem they had on their own.”

  “And traded themselves a new one,” Gold said. Assuming the dampening field went up sometime after their distress message was broadcast, it had been active for not quite twelve hours. In another twelve, the people inside that field would start to exhibit symptoms of tetryon radiation poisoning. “Options, people.”

  “There is a weak point of the field, sir,” Shabalala said. “The field is being generated by a central transmission point. It’s projecting its field three hundred and sixty degrees on the horizontal plane, but vertically, the highest angle of transmission is point one-four degrees off the zenith.”

  “Like a huge umbrella of energy covering the planet,” Gomez said, “with just a very narrow cone extending straight up from its center.”

  Gold rubbed his chin as he visualized what Gomez described. “So, we could position ourselves directly above their transmitter?” They could then direct a signal through the “cone,” like the old-style speaking tubes they’d used on ships before wire voice transmission.

  “We’d still need to boost the signal enough to cut through the bleed-through radiation,” Shabalala noted, “and we’d need to keep an extremely precise geosynchronous orbit.”

  “How precise?”

  “We’d have to position the ship within a fifteen-hundred-meter diameter window, and hold it there as the planet rotates below us. It would also help if we could be inside the ionosphere.”

  Gold turned to the young lieutenant at conn. “Wong?”

  “With one hand tied behind my back, sir.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Gold settled back into his command chair. “Just keep us in the sweet spot.”

  Wong nodded, then turned his full attention to his board. Despite his mock boasting a moment earlier, both of his hands were in constant motion across his board. Planetary orbit was normally a very automatic procedure. But then, normally it didn’t require more than line-of-sight alignment with a surface station. Keeping the ship in such precise alignment with a single point rotating at a relative five hundred meters per second, while at the same time fighting the drag of the upper atmosphere, was enough to keep Wong’s attention focused.